#kresh

[contentment-of-cats]

WIP bit 4

Ar'alani fumed. It was ridiculous!

Thrawn and his Humans needed less rescuing than one might imagine, and had indeed reacted to the surprise of the Steadfast showing up in their battlespace with-

She ground her teeth so hard that Kresh looked at her in alarm.

-with an ion torpedo into their hangar bay, blowing every system offline and crippling the pride of the CEDF.

In the aftermath of battle, Thrawn evacuated the Steadfast - no gravitics, no environmental systems, no inertial dampening, no shields, not even battery power to run lights. He was apologetic, but his weapons officer was good at her job and neutralized the ship. They'd had to do it before to two CEDF ships that were allied with the Grysk. It gave Ar'alani chills to think the Grysk had access to Nightdragon-class ships, but after the civil war and its many unwelcome revelations, she was not surprised.

Honestly. What did Thrawn think she was going to do to his senior weapons officer, slice her over her breakfast cereal?

"He is very protective of his Humans," Kresh soothed. "They're so small and delicate."

"Delicate? The whole race is crazed and traumatized after decades of warfare." Yet they'd taken to the sky-walkers and were positively nurturing. After the shouting died down. "I ought to be terrified of his Humans."

Eli had assured Ar'alani that the weapons officer was a close friend of his from before. He'd arrange a meeting somehow. Maybe in one of the dojos in bridge officer country.

It took no small amount of doing and when Ar'alani laid eyes on her, the light went on. Small, even for a Human, female, and as feral as a pusheen. And if Pyron'di had been a pusheen, her ears would have been laid back and her tail boofed out wider than her head.

Ar'alani drew herself up. She could pick this one up and spin her like a fighting stick. "You. You fired on my ship."

The tiny one drew herself up in turn and snipped back in Rentor-accented Cheunh, "I did not fire on your ship - I hit your ship."

The nerve.

Then she had the further nerve to add smugly, "Twice."

[anastasiiaosypova]

I just hope Karyn Faro and Ar'alani are having a moment of peace before they go fix the mess that galaxy is

[alenchikova]

🌘👅🌒

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Kresh the Bloodbraided

Each of his twenty-two braids is bound with bone and leather from a foe.

Artist: Raymond Swanland TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[thecreativemillennial]

Carrying on her mother's legacy: charlie Kresh as Yen Kwan

[theshijlegacy]

Who’s your favorite Oc?

What is your Fav Oc’s childhood like?

Thanks for the ask! That would have to be Kresh, aka Krec'yare'iflar, aka Totally Not My Self-Insert. :-)

Kresh is the oldest of 3 girls. She was born on Dxun, during one of her parents' (Tur'anga and Torian Cadera) many hunting trips. Much of her childhood was spent traversing the galaxy with her parents, their crew, and assorted groups of Mandalorians - whether hunting big game, bounties, or just the next adventure. Her dad in particular was big on Mando tradition and started teaching Kresh to hunt and defend herself as soon as she was able to walk. She was fearless and eager to challenge everything head-on.

Although they spent a large portion of their time planet-hopping, the family had a home on Rishi. Kresh had a knack for metalworking - anything from desh to durasteel to beskar - and had her own niche to use as a workshop. At first she only made small accoutrements and armor pieces, but eventually she worked up to making a few complete sets. She still has most of them.

Things got complicated when her middle sister Cyn was born. Cyn was trouble from day 1 - excessively colicky, fussy, and increasingly defiant as she got older. Even with help from other clans, Tur'anga and Torian had to spend more and more time caring for their younger child, often leaving Kresh with their crew or other close friends. Gault took her under his wing and started teaching her the finer arts of smuggling, hustling, and fighting dirty. Kresh took a shine to him and was soon enjoying her time with "Uncle Gault;" she also picked up a lot of his smart-assery and ability to push people's buttons (her parents LOVED that).

When Kresh was 7, her family went on an extended visit to Csilla, and her youngest sister Shep was born there. Despite being only half-Chiss, the girls were warmly accepted by her mother's family, especially their grandfather. (Kresh and both her sisters got honorary Chiss names - her given name is actually Krec'yare Cadera.) Cyn in particular thrived, and Tur'anga and Torian decided that it would be best if she stayed on Csilla.

Kresh didn't miss her middle sister very much; she had viewed Cyn mostly as an annoyance that took up all of her parents' time. She did feel more sisterly to Shep, but they were far enough apart in age that they didn't do much together - and Uncle Gault was more fun anyway.

Over the next several years Kresh continued to receive informal education and training from both the Mandalorians and Gault, and when she reached the age of majority (14, due to being half-Chiss), she decided to try this smuggling thing on her own.

[cultfaction]

Bloodline Killer arrives this April!

Directed by Ante Novakovic, Bloodline Killer is a terrifying horror-thriller that follows Moira Cole who endeavors to rebuild her shattered life after the murder of her family at the hands of her deranged and obsessed cousin. It stars Shawnee Smith, Taryn Manning, Drew Moerlein, James Gaudioso, Montanna Gillis, Kresh Novakovic, Adam Shippey, Anthony Gaudioso with Bruce Dern and Tyrese Gibson. s

[supadupasonic]

SONIC OCSS

[inbabylontheywept]

Someone had to go first

The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.

“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”

“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.

“I did,” he replied. “But someone had to go first.”

That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.

“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”

I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.

“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”

I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.

“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”

I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.

--- --- --- --- ---

Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.

After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.

He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.

The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.

That was an eternity during a siege.

The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.

Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.

A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:

Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.

Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.

The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.

--- --- --- --- ---

The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.

It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.

Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.

“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-

“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.”

He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.

I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.

But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.

I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.

“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”

“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”

I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough.

--- --- --- --- ---

The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.

“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.

“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.

We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.

“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.

“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”

“Good,” he said.

I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.

It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.

[encyclopediacr]

Last month at the wiki — February 2024

Every month, we highlight significant work done in the previous month by our editing community at Encyclopedia Exandria. We're a little bit out of schedule, a week late, but we still take the time to look back at February 2024.

To start, here's a selection of ten articles created in February. You can find more of our newest articles at the 50 newest pages report.

Glove of Storing, magical glove that stores an item by shrinking it

Crafting a Mystery with Aabria Iyengar, special on game mastering Candela Obscura: Tide & Bone featuring @quiddie

Midst Season 2 Roundtable Discussion w/ Sam & Marisha, as it says on the tin with the creators of @midstpodcast

Kreviris Imperium, a government based in Kreviris on Ruidus

Wuukor, bison-like creature on Ruidus

Sia Kresh, expositor of the Cobalt Soul in Rexxentrum

Arborea, an Outer Plane of Existence

Lake Umamu, lake in Issylra

Dragon tooth necklace, necklace that notifies wearers of other paired necklaces that a wearer was knocked unconscious or killed

Phyllis the Pain Elemental, player character of Anjali Bhimani in the DOOM Eternal one-shot

We're continuing to explore ways to cover campaign player character stats over time. In February, levels subpages for Campaign 3 were created to help set that up and start covering this topic as part of our routine coverage. Each main player character of Bells Hells has one, and you can check out the pages for Fearne Calloway and Orym as examples.

A number of early Campaign 2 Talks Machina articles have been updated with answer summaries, including 54: The Howling Mines (2x06), 55: Hush (2x07), and 56: The Gates of Zadash (2x08).

The fourth chapter of Candela Obscura premiered in February, featuring the Circle of the Crimson Mirror. As always, we have articles for our newest circle of investigators.

[accursedkaleeshi]

Art trade: The lovely Rarek Kresh of & for @alenchikova

[moriche]

@duckprintspress

May Trope Mayhem Day 17 - Meet Cute

Sharn gra-Muzgob was supposed to meet him here in the next fifteen minutes. He’d arrived early, so he could be the one to pick a table — one where he could keep his back to the wall and the door within his sight. Closcius served him a glass of mazte, and Veryn swirled it around, staring at the pale yellow liquid as he wondered what to expect of her. Sharn worked with the Mages Guild as a researcher, which meant he could hardly visit her at the Guild Hall. Better to meet up on neutral terrain instead. He passed the time by reading the many obscenities and shoddy drawings carved into the table, some covered by globs of wax from the thick, drooping candles on top, until the door clattered and an Orc walked in. She looked like your average scholar: brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, robes of undyed kresh fibre and a thin green summer cloak. She scanned the room searchingly, and he stood up to wave her over. “Hey,” she said. “You’re Veryn, then? Veryn Sadri?”

[alenchikova]

Some Kaleeshes for you 🧡

[eleemosynecdoche]

Fornit doesn't exist, why?

*putting on my ceremonial mesh tights and sparkly capelet*

*ascending before the altar*

*clearing my throat*

Because it sucks!

Or, putting it longer and with more jargon- Fonrit is a part of Glorantha where the fantasy content is so heavily impregnated with sensationalistic depictions of slavery in North Africa from an older generation of adventure fiction, and tied in with a heavy dose of Orientalism. So, it's got a lot of racism in the basic premise before you get to the Vadeli (and hoo boy, the Vadeli)! But of course, Glorantha has been consistently racist to varying degrees in its content, and there are plenty of places where you have to cut away a lot of material and yet I still go there. (Caladraland featured heavily in the game I recently finished playing).

Fonrit is, I would say, worse, but not so much because of the specific details, but rather because of a deeper problem- there's not much playable content when you look at it.

I don't mean that we need a Fonrit book, or Fonrit adventures. Looking at other places in Pamaltela, the Kothar/Jolar border zone, which is also filled with racist content left over from old adventure fiction and has little published material, has some immediately playable content. You have the Kresh and Arbennan confederacies in tension, preparing for war, you have (sigh) monsters marching from out of the desert, you have the fire people from beyond the desert, you have the goblins of the marshes to the east- there's an explosive metasituation to explore and play with. Even Kimos, which is just a "wow, cool fantasy backdrop material, bro!" set of paragraphs, has a nascent situation with the Gorgers you could explore.

These would require a lot of work to make playable, I would say, because there isn't that much material to draw from, but you have something to build on. It's much more work than even Ralios or Seshnela or, for fuck's sake, Arolanit, would require. Incomparable to near-instantly playable places like Fronela, Dragon Pass, the Holy Country, or the Lunar Empire, or not-quite-places like the Arkat/Gbaji content.

Fonrit then has the basal problem that there's just not that much playable content there. You have conflicts between two different moral abysses in the form of the slaver factions, and I just don't give a shit about that. You have the Pujaleg in Laskal, who are of course, denoted as evil within the fandom discourse, but even if you rightly discard that and kick it to the curb, it's just- what, a moral crusade with "grey moments" added in by force to make it feel less one-sided? Similarly, you have the Veldang, who are blue people racially oppressed by black people, and you could play a really grim situation about Veldang resistance and revolutionary efforts- turns out they're the descendants of the evil Artmali! And there's the Vadeli, still.

In order to make a playable situation, that is one with interesting and explosive tensions players and their characters can interact with, you have to essentially make your own Fonrit, or at least I would and I think the overwhelming majority of people would as well. Going back to the Vadeli, the Vadeli are extremely problematic as a part of Gloranthan content, because the extant material generally uses antisemitic stereotypes taken to cartoonish extremes- they're so blood-libel they eat their own children to stay immortal! They're so sexually perverse they use axolotl tanks from Dune!!

Now. When I said "problematic", I mean it very precisely, because when you dig down to the basal Vadeli content of Revealed Mythologies, you get a very different picture. And then pieces, for me, fell into place. Because knowing what I know about Greg Stafford, for him, at least for most of his life, Arkat's journey was modeled on a fantastical interpretation of his own life, coming from a repressed mainline Christian New England military family (horali from Brithos) and journeying through Hrestoli knighthood (reading Arthuriana at a young age) and then paganism (dropping out of Beloit College and becoming a hippie and self-professed shaman).

So perhaps, what we are meant to do by Stafford is read the Vadeli content in this way: the Vadeli are fantasy Jews, they are directly victimized by these antisemitic stereotypes applied to them by Malkioni fantasy Christians. Brithini dominion and Zzabur's genocide kept them reduced to the status of peasants who cannot defend themselves, with no soldiers ("horali") or priests ("wizards") and not even a general public memory of rulers ("talars").

This is problematic because this reading of the content, this interpretation, doesn't erase the antisemitic implications of the content, adds some more, and of course it doesn't carry an instantly playable situation in and of itself- what are the Vadeli doing that brings them into tension, with other people or with themselves? And beyond that, there are questions of who has a "right" to play such things in a roleplaying game, though I will be even more overly candid here than I've already been and note that I strongly believe that the concerns related to cultural appropriation in other media don't apply to roleplaying in the same way, and many don't apply at all.

(This is also a specific *possibility* or *option* for play, though I think it makes much more sense than making the Vadeli colonizers. Feel free to ask me about that, by the by, if you want a real rant on your hands.)

Anyways, I still don't have *that* much interest in doing the work necessary to finish the Vadeli to a playable state even given that. But I think that work is something I could see myself doing, in a more limited fashion, if the Vadeli entered into play on the outskirts, because I find some aspects of the Revealed Mythologies content affecting and interesting. And for Fonrit, I just think that there's so little interesting content in it that I have and would fireaxe it away in play (see the link for an explanation of that term) and just agree that it's not there. If anyone wants to go there in play... well, that's a subject for an actual game.

I have a similar but distinct set of thoughts about Prax and Kralorela, but I won't bloat this post up any further.

[aroundmesitsthenight]

"[...], I lead a horrible synthetic life [...]."

Franz Kafka, from a diary entry dated October 26th 1911, featured in 'Diaries'. (translated by Joseph Kresh)

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Mage Slayer

"When the wielder is strong enough, any sword will do." —Kresh the Bloodbraided

Artist: Lars Grant-West TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link